Twitter / jeremyweate

Monday, October 08, 2007

Pius Adesanmi questions the omission of African feminists scholars from the Norton Anthology and challenges the editors as to why “an entire continent is seen to have produced nothing of feminist theorizing “I am interested in the conscious and the subconscious processes that led you to the conclusion that Africa, an entire continent of fifty-four countries and over a billion people, has contributed nothing, absolutely nothing, to five centuries of feminist theorizing. After all, as seasoned academics in the United States, you both know that exclusions tell much louder stories than inclusions.”

Dear Sandra and Susan, I salute you both in the name of feminism, women's liberation, gender equality, and, most importantly, global sisterhood. The publication of your much-anticipated Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism: A Norton Reader is such an epochal event that I must interrupt the blissful and well-deserved eternal sleep that was eventually accorded me when the people and government of France, ever so fatherly and motherly when it comes to taking care of poor Africa, graciously returned my brain and backside to the South African government for burial in my ancestral homeland a few years ago. I join the American and the global feminist family in congratulating the two of you on the publication of this truly wonderful volume. It is obvious that feminist intellectual labor will never ever be the same again. Resounding success, I must say, has become synonymous with the long history of intellectual collaboration between the two of you. Afterall, The Mad Woman in the Attic, the first gift of your collaborative efforts to humanity, has remained the only inevitable, unavoidable bible of feminist scholarship ever since it was published.

The reference to the magnanimity of France in returning my remains to the government and people of South Africa should have given my identity away by now. However, it is always safe and wise to swear by the natural invisibility of Africa and Africans in matters of global import. And in your immediate context in the United States, it is outright foolish to assume that anybody considers anything about Africa worth knowing. Except, of course, hunger, starvation, poverty, wars, AIDS, famine, and Western charity or "giving" (apologies to President Bill Clinton). I must therefore assume complete ignorance of my identity and introduce myself. I hope you will find it in your hearts to pardon my presumptuousness if you are both already familiar with my story.

My name is Sarah Baartman, also famously known internationally as "the Hottentot Venus". I will spare you the sassy details of my story and focus only on the essential. I was lured to London in 1810 where I soon became a prisoner of Europe's rapacious and capitalistic voyeurism. I'm sure I don't have to tell you the story of 19 th century Europe and its treatment of its Others in Africa and other places. No doubt, you still remember your Orientalism - Edward Said has been a very good friend since he got here. The Europe of this period was also a formidable theatre of all kinds of exhibitions.

Zoophilism was in the air. The colored Other needed to be displayed publicly and regularly in London, Paris, and Lisbon as colonial fauna.As fate always manages to arrange these things, I was what Europeans called – and still call- an "African tribeswoman" gifted with an exceptional backside. Europe's science promptly concluded that my buttocks suffered from a biological deformity known as steatopygia.

The lips of my womanhood were also considered to be too huge and elongated for the civilized global standards determined by the labia of white women. And so from Britain to France my backside and the lips of my womanhood became objects of visual consumption in the public spheres of White patriarchy. For an extra fee, White men could even touch my behind while I was on display.

Death eventually came calling. You must know that where I come from in Africa, death is no finality. I merely transitioned to ancestor hood in the worldview of my people, hence the reverence with which Africans treat the dead. Not so Europeans. They took their knives and carving objects, carved out my brain, the lips of my womanhood, and my backside, put them in bottles, and kept them in public display at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris. Yes, I can see you cringe. You should. All sensitive feminists should. The idea, just the idea! The bitter tragedy of a woman's most vital parts captured by men, carved out of her dead body by men, and stored in the Museum of Man! Of all places!

My parts remained in public view in that museum, ultimate evidence of patriarchy's victory over feminism, until 1974 when they were withdrawn into a private sanctuary. Finally in 2002, France returned her precious conquest to the people of South Africa.

Dear sisters, the significance of my story to the feminist cause and to global feminist intellectual labor should be quite obvious by now.For nearly two centuries, I was an international feminist cause célèbre, the very embodiment of patriarchal control over African female sexuality, black female sexuality, and, I daresay, female sexuality. Let me be clear: the story of my body in the international economy of meaning is the story of your own bodies, the story of every woman's body. The difference lies merely in the detail or what your postmodernist colleagues would call local particularities.

Given the fact that my narrative has become one of the most formidable sites – I hate it when I sound like you academics! – of global feminist contestation and intellection, it stands to reason that any reasonable person would expect me to make a grand, celebrated entrance into your Norton volume through the work of any of the numerous African feminist scholars of international repute who have written about me. At the risk of sounding immodest, nobody would expect to pick up a summation of five centuries of feminist intellectual labor – which your Norton anthology represents - and draw a blank with regard to the story of Sarah Baartman. After all, I've been theorized, postcolonized, and postmodernized in all the faddish versions of feminisms out there. I didn't think it was possible for me to be disappeared in any serious historiographical account of feminist theory. I didn't expect to be Ralph Ellisoned.

Trust me my dear sisters, I was not motivated to write you by any narcissistic self-indulgence. You will admit, from what you now know of my story, that I am quite used to being silenced, being disappeared. I am actually more worried by the broader, deeper ideological implications of your having disappeared me softly from your Norton volume. I am interested in the stories told – or untold – by your editorial choices and options, the instinct to include and the impulse to exclude. I am interested in the conscious and the subconscious processes that led you to the conclusion that Africa, an entire continent of fifty-four countries and over a billion people, has contributed nothing, absolutely nothing, to five centuries of feminist theorizing. After all, as seasoned academics in the United States, you both know that exclusions tell much louder stories than inclusions. I know we are on the same page here.

Some people may praise you for making this volume truly global and representative by including the multi-layered voices of the Other.They would be right if they did that. After all, you included essays by bell hooks, Hortense Spillers, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Audre Lorde, evidence of your awareness of Africana feminist voices and practices; you included essays by Gayatri Spivak and Chandra Mohanty, evidence of your awareness of the expansive field of Third World/postcolonial/transnational feminist voices and practices; the entry by Paula Gunn Allen saved the day for Native American feminisms; Gloria Anzaldua – another good friend of mine here – thankfully guarantees the presence of Chicana feminisms in your volume. In essence, the presence of these Other voices, strategically sprinkled in the text, is a laudable proof of the fact that you paid attention when Hazel Carby screamed in an article: "White Woman Listen"! You listened. You agreed with her that feminism could and should no longer be the gospel of the White western female according to Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett, Judith Butler, Diana Fuss, Elaine Showalter and others too numerous to mention. You agreed with Carby that the narratives of the French delegation – Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Monique Wittig, and Julia Kristeva – should no longer be deemed universal. You agreed that Chinese women are probably better positioned to speak for and about themselves than be represented and spoken for by Julia Kristeva's About Chinese Women.

It is your awareness of these things that makes your excision of African feminist theories and theorists from your volume all the more alarming. Could it be that you imagined that the voices of the African American women you selected adequately speaks for those of their continental sisters? Possibly. If this is the case, I must tell you that African American women cannot be made to stand in and speak for continental African women. According to an African proverb, the monkey and the gorilla may claim oneness, monkey is monkey and gorilla gorilla. Perhaps you imagined that African women would be better served to find some space inside the Third World/postcolonial/transnational feminist umbrella you represented with the voices of Gayatri Spivak and Chandra Mohanty? Possibly. Could it be that you are simply unaware of the considerable body of African feminist intellection, right there in your back of the wood in the US academy? Possibly. Could it be that you just simply elected to disappear them like you disappeared me? Possibly.

I'm sure you know that Bill O'Reilly, the famous rightwing fundamentalist talkative on Fox News – has only just discovered in 2007 that African Americans are capable of eating properly with fork and knife, you know, like real, normal people. Now, I don't want you to travel that path. I don't want you to discover, in 2007, that continental African women have been theorizing feminism for a very long time in US academe and have produced a considerable body of work, one or two of which should deservedly have passed through the eye of Norton's needle. Since you included work by Alice Walker, I take it that you both know how well her theory of "womanism" has traveled in US and global women studies programs and departments. Trouble is, in 1985, before Walker used the term, Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, a US-based Nigerian feminist scholar, had published an essay in Signs entitled: "Womanism: The Dynamics of the Contemporary Black Female Novel in English". Now, Signs is not a journal the two of you could have missed. It's the most prestigious peer reviewed journal of feminist studies in the United States. But let's assume you somehow missed it, Ogunyemi subsequently published a very important book, African Wo/Man Palava, with the University of Chicago press in 1996.

Did you also miss that? We're talking U of Chicago Press for God's sake!

There is also Obioma Nnaemeka, a formidable feminist theorist based in Indiana University. Her reputation is global. Secure. Frankly speaking, her essay, "Feminism, Rebellious Women, and Cultural Boundaries" has no business not making your Norton Reader. There is of course her formidable work on female circumcision in Africa. By the way, isn't female circumcision in Africa – genital mutilation in Western parlance – supposed to be a subject of sensational predilection for western feminists and NGOs? If not a single excerpt from Obioma Nnaemeka's edited volume, Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge: African Women in Imperialist Discourses, made it into your volume, don't you think that something is awfully wrong?

There is also Oyeronke Oyewumi, an important US-based feminist theorist. The University of Minnesota Press published her book, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, to critical acclaim in 1997. Not even a chapter in this book is worthy of inclusion? There is also Ifi Amadiume. She teaches at Dartmouth. Her Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender in an African Society is a priceless classic. Did you also miss that? There are Molara Ogundipe and Nkiru Nzegwu. How about the Egyptian, Nawal El Saadawi and the Algerian, Assia Djebar? These two global figures of women's writing and feminist intellectual labor have written nothing that could have made the cut and rescued an entire continent? You will notice that I have refrained from mentioning any of the numerous important feminist thinkers based in Africa. I do not want to bore you. It is also better to cite those whose alterity in US academe one would have believed you couldn't conceivably have missed.

I read sadly in your preface that "our own conversations about the construction of this book has been enhanced by many colleagues and friends who have shared syllabi with us, discussed their teaching practices, and made suggestions about possible inclusions". A long list of names follows and this is where the sadness lies: that not once in all these conversations with this expansive cast of consultants did my story and the story of Africa's contribution to feminist theorizing crop up. Not one person, not one colleague across the feminist studies landscape in the US pointed out this ominous oversight – if indeed it was an oversight – to you? Obioma Nnaemeka is Susan Gubar's neighbor in Indiana for Christ's sake!

There is some good news though. There won't be a shortage of happy African intellectuals who will query the wisdom of even expecting Africa to have been included in your work in the first place. Why do we always whine and complain when Westerners ignore us, they will say?

It is not their responsibility to include us. We should include ourselves by creating our own structures, period! After all, Oyeronke Oyewumi, as if anticipating what would happen with your Norton project, had edited African Gender Studies: A Reader in 2005. Such opinions would of course ignore the simple fact that your work has a universalizing underpinning in terms of its historical breadth and its thematic scope and Africa has been excluded from this picture. They would ignore the fact that this is Norton and who says Norton says canons! They would ignore the fact that even if we were to adopt the reductionist approach that all you have done here is to reflect the multiple voices that have inflected feminist, gender, and women studies in the American academy over the years, the end product conveys the fallacious message that no African woman has been part of this process.

I know you are already wondering how an African woman, who died so many years ago with no evidence of having attended any University, happens to be so familiar with academic language and procedure. You should know the answer to that: I'm now an ancestor, a spirit. I'm not human. I'm supposed to know everything. That is what sanctions my intervention in the affairs of you mortals!

uh..just got ralph ellison reference- with that sudden clarity one gets after the second glass of vin blanc. Stillnes in my hear, quietness in my brain- this comment not post worthy..just an observation. i mean, who f'ing cares?